Wednesday, September 17, 2014

and raise you. Just bought a Nikon D3300! In the future, I can help make fancy photos at Mancon and join in on the video fun. Maybe add in a little photography to whatever you guys need for sites, pics, etc.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

This is fun. In addition to being a prime example of Y2K web design, this website documents all the character deaths from the original Boot Hill storyline. It was brutal! I think all told, more than half the characters died in the big finale to that first cycle of cards, with most of those being in the Revelations set (when the big demon that'd been coming the whole game finally came out and shit got real).

Hey man, I'm just trying to give you some options so you don't stress while building decks! But I think "wrecking 3 of 4 factions" is a huge stretch. The format puts Fourth Ring behind the 8-ball for sure (fuck those clowns!), but I think the other factions should be fine. (Gadgets seem more supplemental than primary for Morgan -- and lots of Gadgets have very low pull requirements anyway.)

I started building decks at lunch and they're looking pretty good! The suit/value distribution in the core s a little better than I thought.

BTW, when we built decks back in the old days we honestly didn't sweat the suits/values that much. 99% of the time we just threw in whatever seemed cool and the decks worked out fine, if not tournament caliber.

Yeah, deckbuilding's an important component -- but the nice thing is that if you're building all the decks, you can control the extent of the craziness!

As I mentioned in our (very sexy) private correspondence, a great variant Back in the Day (tm) was the Bicycle format. (Bicycle as in the poker deck manufacturer.) In that format, you create a "legal" deck which can't cheat -- in other words, one each of Ace-King, in each of the four values. The nice thing about this format is that it is a lot easier to build decks, and you get a somewhat purer poker experience out of the shootouts. The downside is it somewhat hinders decks that need to Pull a lot, and Cheatin' cards become largely irrelevant (including some of the nuLaw Dogs' abilities).

Now, that was easy when the card pool got mammoth, but would be tough in the new card pool. But I think a good format would be the MOSTLY legal deck. Let's say you start by building a Bicycle deck, but you can have duplicate suit/values for, say, 10 cards? That makes deckbuilding a lot easier, while still giving some flexibility.

I'm at home for at least a little while longer (on call for jury duty!) so maybe I'll give this a try at lunch!

In a cosmic twist of coincidence, JRoSplon invited me to his gaming session, but I couldn't: I had a date with my copy of Doomtown across town! We played three 2-player games, and they went quite differently than did JOrN's games. My opponent was the Sloane gang for all three games, I was the Law Dogs for the first two (and thought they sucked, I got mauled!) and the Ranchers for the last game. Neither of us had ever played before. Here's the summary I sent J'shpegan yesterday:

Game 1: The sloanes won first player, dropped a shotgun on Ramiro (uh oh... Shotgun is bad news on Ramiro. It aces anyone with value 3 or less before the shooting starts!) and moseyed on out into the town square. I played the railroad station (controller can boot the RRS to move a dude anywhere unbooted), the only deed I had. We had a big gunfight out at the RRS, he aced my stud (the one who punishes cheaters, a good dude) with his shotgun (which boots it), and killed another dude in the ensuing firefight, the remaining two law dogs scooted on home, booted. Ramiro hops on a train and exits (right next door) at my Outfit, fresh and unbooted as a springtime daisy compliments of the !@#! RRS, and proceeds to kill the heck outta my last two guys (even though the shotgun was booted and thus not used). Er. That was quick... Shotgun on Ramiro is ridiculous. Kindof a "gee, let's just say you won, we reshuffle and try again, eh?" ridiculous. If you're playing against someone with shotgun who has a high-bullet dude, you can take anyone with a low value...!

Game 2: This time he played a deed (the Chinese tailors, +2 to income!) and I felt I needed to keep him from that income. The LD are money starved, and I was envious of his budding economy: no deed cards in my hand! So all my dudes moseyed on over. he sent someone out to the town square to get his +1 ghost rock (Outfit ability), and the rest of us shot it out at the tailors. I had good shootout cards, and stripped him down to size before the shootin' started. I had the draw advantage, and the stud advantage: but he crushed me! Drew a perfect hand, didn't really even need to redraw. We got into several gunfights over the course of our two games, and the LD lost each one (paradoxically: they also lost each low-ball gambling first phase nonsense! I had serious luck and money troubles). Even catching him cheatin' once or twice, I just lost lost lost. Lousy luck, but it also seems like the LD deck isn't really built for gunfights (JOnn claims otherwise, so I'm eager to try 'em again). So yeah, I lost that one in a turn or three too.

Game 3: he stuck it out with the Sloane gang, and I took the Cattle ranchers. I got three deeds in my hand at the get-go (which means I was pretty weak at other stuff of course), but it turns out he wasn't much better off. I lost first turn, and so only had one ghost rock: not enough to play a deed yet. Irving, one of my lousier gunfighters, has a cool ability: get a ghost rock if he joins a posse. So I picked an easy fight to get the ghost rock (I think it was a tie, or something, no casualties, then I bailed out and went back to my outfit, booted) and play the deed. He moved to take over my deed, then played one of his own, which I moved to take over within a turn or so, and without contest since his dudes were all over on my side of town (and one of my dudes had a horse which helped him unboot after joining a posse or something). He also played another dude with upkeep, so his economy eventually shrank to zero. The next turn he moved to take back his deed (again, I fled - though the gunfights I did get into I ruled even though that's not my forte - four of a kind, twice! Only a little cheatin', mebbe. Thank you also, joker!) and within another turn I had four deeds down and just won cause he couldn't get his dudes off his deed without booting and didn't therefore have enough time to get back over to contest ownership - something like my four Control to his 3 Influence by the time the dust had settled since he'd lost a few dudes in the four-of-a-kind gunfights. There's an interesting article up on the Doomtown page about why they reduced the number of strikes (in short: easy money and control) because of the number of high strikes decks would just swamp the opponent with deeds - they couldn't take them over as quickly as they came out once your economy starts rolling! That's pretty much the deck I had, just by chance.

That poker thing is interesting, but can be really rough! It also seems like you build decks to get duplicates of things (pairs, 3- and 4-of-a-kind) rather than straights or flushes. So the whole probability thing of not just taking cool cards, but taking cool cards with similar values or suits, is weird. Add to that, if you're playing ranchers or circus freaks the fact that you have to take high values so you can build your gadgets and cast your spells. Given how tight your economy is: if you try to build a gadget, spend the money and then fail... Ouch! Seems deckbuilding is kinda hard, actually. So the game is super cool, but I'm not so stoked about how multidimensional the deckbuilding is relative to Warhammer Invasion, my current favorite card game. I think my brain will explode - I like playing these games, but don't love the deckbuilding bits.

Sunday, September 14, 2014

I went out to the Sunset last night and cracked out Doomtown with enr0n and Myke! I haven't had a gaming break in a long, long time, and it was really what the doctor ordered.

At first, getting back into it was difficult and kinda mend-bending, because while Myke and I had a pretty good grasp on the rules, we'd utterly forgotten the strategy of playing. It's a really unique game that plays like a board game in many ways -- on top of which, learning the whole new set of Dudes took a while. (There are a few characters that survived from the earlier version, but their rules and factions have changed. A few goods, actions and deeds have carried over with identical or similar rules.)

enr0n played the Sloane Gang, Gomorra's resident set of outlaws. (According to the Jackson's Strike card, Black Jack has retired to a peaceful life of back-breaking mining). I had the new iteration of the Law Dogs. Myke had the Fourth Ring, a collection of magic-using circus freaks that rolled into town. Essentially, enr0n ruled the town the first couple turns, then the dogs got pissed and started shooting back. Meanwhile, at the circus, there were a series of scary juggling acts. The climax was at enr0n's tailor, where the dogs had a series of battles that ended up basically wiping everybody with influence that could counter them, then shot a clown. Victory!

After that, enr0n and I got in a 2-player game. It was late, so we probably weren't thinking too strategically here, but the main action of the game was an epic, 6-round shootout on turn 1 that put most of his dudes in boot hill. Victory!

It was a good time for sure. At least for the Law Dogs, I like the design of the new dudes (they're themed around punishing the opponent for playing cheatin' hands, especially if they have legal ones). I'm not so sure about these prebuilt decks that come in the box -- they're good at shootouts, but we all felt like we weren't pulling enough deeds, so we were a little overly money starved -- but I'm looking forward to tinkering around and getting into the new cards. (It's nice to have a smaller card set to play with, too -- my old collection was four big longboxes.)

The rules changes generally seem positive. The big one is that shootouts are a little less deadly now, so you're more likely to be able to send some guys home or have a longer shootout than I remember from the old version. There are no longer Events, which a little I'm on the fence about. They could clog up your hand, and Event design seemed to get a little lazy at the game went on, but they were also one of the most fun ways that the storyline evolved. There are way fewer out-of-town deeds now.

Summary: throw away every other game in your collection and buy like 20 copies of this one, thanks. The end.